[ricudis]

It's an excessively common scam nowadays that everybody is requiring an eVisa or electronic travel notice.

Fun story:

Once I was traveling to a country X that I was familiar enough with to know that thir governmental services web sites were awfully designed. We're talking about web design that would easily put Geocities to shame.

They had recently introduced an eVisa scheme that I have to complete.

Out of tirednes and being in a rush, I clicked at the wrong link. It gets me into a shiny, modern web page with nice graphics and a form to complete.

I instinctively think "WAIT! This is TOO nice for an official site!".

Then I look at the address bar, see an obvious scam-SEO URL, realize my mistake, and go back to search for the real one.

Which was as terribly designed as expected.

[neom]

I hear about this repeatedly with South Korea - just googled and sure enough the first result is a sponsored scam site.

[BLKNSLVR]

I'm not sure how Google can't be held responsible for this. They're literally advertising scams. They're taking money for putting up an ad for a scam site.

I don't know how there is an excuse for this that's acceptable to any authority. It's their own platform that they seem unable to control.

Take some responsibility Google, you are profiting by facilitating evil (even moreso than by regular advertising).

[AnthonyMouse]

> I'm not sure how Google can't be held responsible for this. They're literally advertising scams. They're taking money for putting up an ad for a scam site.

The thing I don't understand is why people keep expecting them to. Who even wants Google to be the police? To actually act as a deterrent you need the ability to impose penalties, and for that you need the actual police.

All Google can do is close their account, and then there are no real penalties so they just make new ones until they figure out how to beat the fraud detection system.

And if you try to impose penalties on third parties for not being able to solve a problem they're structurally unable to solve, all they can do is crank up the false positive rate and mess things up for innocent people.

Stop even asking for this. It's a dystopia. Put the actual scammers in prison instead.

[BLKNSLVR]

I don't understand your position at all (and I don't mean this aggressively, I just can't get myself into a position of understanding). From my current perspective you seem to be absolving Google of any responsibility for, literally, their product.

My reasoning is:

Google have created an advertising platform. It is their raison d'etre; their entire millions per hour profit engine. But they only built the easy, profitable half because there were / are no regulations to enforce the responsible, difficult half.

They built the half that allows anyone with the money to put something on their platform. They didn't build the half that makes sure that they're not helping scammers, con artists, and outright criminals from reaching the global audience that their wonderful, profitable, scalable platform enables.

They should be policing it on their own to an extent that obvious scams and fake banking websites and clickbait should be detected. Even just to appear to not be a crime-facilitation platform, which they currently are.

To me it feels analogous to Microsoft and their commitment to security of Windows. It's not a priority because it's counter to profitability. Privatise the profits and socialise the costs.

If they can't control their own platform, they should not have the platform. It is not a mature enough product to be released upon the world. It is Frankenstein's monster, left to roam.

I would be supportive of legislation that outright banned advertising with Google until they were able to provably clean up their act; if their product was market-ready.

Which three letter agency said that an ad blocker was a required layer of security when browsing the web? There's a good reason: Google. If the Internet is full of scams, who is most responsible for its proliferation?

(I have a massive bias against advertising, so that heavily colours my opinion. I also understand that advertising is inevitable, but it should be held to a much higher standard than, well, the none that exists)

[WorldMaker]

Newspapers and TV channels were held to Truth in Advertising Laws, and obvious scams would trigger law suits, from consumer groups, from the FCC itself sometimes, from rival newspapers and TV channels.

Google has enough of a near-monopoly in ads that there aren't rivals scaled enough to defend the public good out of the greed of their pocket books if not the good of everyone else. Google's competitors are too busy selling ad space to the same and similar lowest common denominator polluters and scammers than to police Google enough to hope to put it out of business.

The FCC gave up on policing anything on the internet ages ago. Between Congressional protections and multiple administrations trying to keep the FCC weak, it doesn't seem to have enough power to do anything towards Google.

I suppose that leaves consumer advocacy groups. I don't know how we build and scale a Consumers Against Predatory Google Ads to the point that it can force Google to reconsider their approach to advertising for the consumer good instead of evil. But then I also don't understand how Google isn't already doing tremendous enough damage to their brand that there isn't already enough of a sentiment that Google is actively engaged in evil and needs to stop, five or six years ago at least (or maybe at least as far back as when Google bought/merged Doubleclick). Their brand, too, seems too big to fail at this point, and it is weird to me.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Google have created an advertising platform. It is their raison d'etre; their entire millions per hour profit engine. But they only built the easy, profitable half because there were / are no regulations to enforce the responsible, difficult half.

Baked into this is the assumption that the "responsible, difficult half" is something that they, rather than law enforcement, should be doing to begin with. Which they can't do effectively because they don't have the ability to impose significant penalties and we certainly don't want to give them that.

Consider how this is even supposed to work. There is often no conclusive way to tell ex ante whether some website is a scam; the premise of them is to look like a real site. Google doesn't know if it's a scammer or some third party contractor who has be commissioned by the actual entity to set up a new site, and real sites are often full of bad UI choices and weird bugs, or open up to nothing more than a login page which the ad network has no credentials to get past.

The way this works with actual law enforcement is that someone suspects a site of being a scam, or a victim files a police report, and then officers investigate. They spend significant resources to figure out if it's actually a scam or just e.g. a competitor trying to have their competition removed from visibility. They have special powers to conduct searches with probable cause. And then if it is a scam, they arrest the scammers, and if it's a false report, they charge that person for filing a false police report, which are necessary in order to provide a deterrent and prevent both of those misbehaviors from proliferating.

Otherwise you get untold numbers of false reports from people trying to grief their rivals, it takes just as much work to do a thorough investigation for each one, and then even if you catch the actual scammers, they just immediately reappear under a different name.

So then they get zillions of reports, many of them fraudulent, and you're proposing to put them in jail if they ever fail to do something they there is no apparent way for them to consistently do.

> I would be supportive of legislation that outright banned advertising with Google until they were able to provably clean up their act; if their product was market-ready.

Consider how this would apply to anything other than advertising. Some bank robbers buy Halloween masks to hide their faces. Drug dealers sell drugs over the internet and a normal mail/package carrier delivers the packages. A hitman rides the bus on the way to a hit. These are felonies! But we don't expect UPS to cut open everyone's packages or the bus driver to strip search every passenger to check for a vial of polonium, and punish them if they ever fail, because that isn't their job. They're not the police.

[BLKNSLVR]

I understand your point a lot better now, thank you. And I like the 'public cars / roads' example and have possibly used it myself in discussions about cryptography and government backdoors etc.

Respectfully, however, I still disagree in this case, although I'm struggling how to articulate why - beyond admitting it could just be my bias against advertising.

My best attempt at articulation is:

Google have built a private road over the top of the public road, that is then spilling sewage and toxic materials onto the public road. Google's private road purely serves to profit Google. There's no public good it is serving, not like a public road or electricity infrastructure.

In writing that, yes, it's a government policy / legislation / regulation failure. But also, Google should be doing better. However, as WorldMaker said above, their brand seems somewhat confusingly, unaffected, so Google has incentive to do better than bottom-of-the-barrel.

As such I can't lay no blame, or anything less than majority blame, at Google's feet. Yes, government's around the world should be doing better at containing the spilling of toxic waste into public spaces that Google both facilitates and turns a blind eye to. Google are too profitable to fail since they can buy the continued regulation vacuum.

I'm not sure how far that went off the rails, I may have just continued ranting a bit there.

Thank you for your replies, though, I do see it from a slightly different angle.

[K0balt]

Google is not a public road. It is A company that operates on public roads that delivers advertising. It’s a company driving around billboard trailers on public roads. Are you saying that a billboard company should not have any ethical standards or liability regarding the companies that they advertise on their billboards? Somehow, Google manages to not openly advertise CSAM buttthey can’t shutdown obvious scams? It’s simply a matter of having a responsible review procedure before publishing an ad. In the age of LLMs , you can’t tell me that is impossible.

[gambiting]

I don't want them to be the police. I want them to give me the thing that I'm searching for first, not whoever outspent everyone else on SEO this year. If I'm searching for "Canadian visa application" then the first result must be the official government website for this. No policing involved - just good old accurate search, like Google used to be known for.

[fallpeak]

You're in luck! If you search for "canadian visa application" the first two results are "Visit Canada" and "How to apply for a visitor visa" on https://www.canada.ca/

[phonon]

On my phone I get several screenheights of sponsored links, with oh so helpful sitelinks and summaries of each scam site. The fourth result is the legit one.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

We want the actual police (law enforcement) to enforce the law and the includes google. If someone reports that this is a scam to them, and they don't act (i.e. take reasonable measures to check), then they become a party to that fraud. We already have laws about this and they are breaking them.

[K0balt]

Ok, so, let’s reframe this:

How would you feel about your local tv station(as if that was a thing anymore) running an ad for senior citizens to invest in free energy generators to reduce their electricity bills?

There are so many blatant scams on Google’s platform that it is simply inexcusable. They are structurally unable to solve it because they have built a business out of being structurally unable to solve it.

That’s like saying that a wildly unsafe amusement park that allows just anyone to come in and set up whatever they want and charge for it is “structurally unable to protect their customers from harm” should just be allowed to keep throwing kids down a cliff in potato sacks just because someone figured out how to make money doing it.

There is no way for me to legally penalize some company in Croatia trying to trick people into paying 600 dollars for access to “free energy from the ground that they can sell to their neighbors”.

In the age of LLMs there is no way you can tell me that they can’t detect these kinds of scam advertisements , or that they can’t detect that country.gov.it.me isn’t probably not an official government site.

If they can’t, they should be put out of business, because they are a public nuisance at best.

They don’t do anything about it because they make money from having no ethical standards for the businesses they promote. No normal business is allowed to operate with a reckless disregard for the harms that they create.

[ricudis]

Nowadays 90% of the "Sponsored" category that I see are scams and clickbait sites The most "innocent" of them are competitor ads trying to convert you from what you're actually searching for.

Unfortunately there are no incentives for Google to fix this. Apparently they make too much money out of it.

[BobaFloutist]

The most most innocent just duplicate the natural correct search result.

[yongjik]

South Korean internet is dysfunctional enough that it's possible that Google is not showing the correct site at the top because the government site's designer helpfully decided to make the site "secure" by adding to robots.txt:

    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /

Source: Worked at Google Korea years ago. Back then, those things were common, and were commonly accepted as a solution to the problem "All your user's profiles are available in plain text, open to public, and searchable from Google!"